Lindsay Joss Iudicello

Full-time Writer

Missoula, MT

Favorite beverage:  Tea

 

 

 

Kimberly Long Cockroft

Writer & Minister of Faith Formation, Grace Episcopal Church

Poulsbo, WA

Favorite beverage: Tea

 

 

 

 

 

These two women go way back:

I’ve been friends with Lindsay Joss Iudicello for decades and there are few people I love more for their compassion, insight, humor, and intelligence.  I first met Lindsay in Nairobi, Kenya; later I glimpsed her at the Chicago-area college we both attended.  But I became close to this extraordinary woman in Missoula, MT, back when we both were just married but without children–so we had many long hours to sit on her porch, gaze at the mountains, and talk.  We’ve never stopped talking, most often over a pot of tea, and now we’re joined by our excellent children.  Lindsay is a lovely godmother to my oldest daughter, and I’m privileged to godparent her beautiful oldest son.

Lindsay notices and expresses beauty in a rare way that I admire and respect–as a serious lifetime scholar.  Now that we live eight hours apart, she answers my scattered emails with concise messages that reference a myriad of writers from Robert Frost to T.S. Eliot.  She intuitively connects the wonderful material of this world with the life of our spirits, the structures of our minds, and the fullness of our well-being.  To be around her is to warm your hands at the fireside of kindness and intelligence.  Over the years, she’s never offered a single pat answer.  Instead, she lives and speaks with wonder, deepened over time through a love for the natural world, endless good reading and conversations with wise people dead and alive, her work in end-of-life care and in the Episcopal Church, and her daily life as a writer, a parent, and a friend.

–KLC

Lindsay’s professional website is lindsayjoss.com.

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” Like C.S. Lewis, the originator of this quote, my dear friend, Kimberly Long Cockroft, shares that particular pang.  She lingers over many such small pleasures of life and enjoys them to their full.  And though good tea drains to the bottom and a book cover closes after the final page, to know Kim is to find something expansive about life, something that opens into the bottomless and eternal.

Kim has a ready laugh, a hapless sense of direction, a boundless imaginative sensibility, and loving attention for all growing things.  Through her childhood spent in Bangladesh and Kenya, to an itinerant adult life that has, in the past few years, set down roots in the Pacific Northwest, Kim has cultivated a love for the diverse beauty of the world, an ear for people’s stories, and a hospitable heart.  From her home on the Kitsap Peninsula, she raises three thoughtful, bold, creative daughters, one stout-hearted, bandy-legged Jack Russell, a gorgeous assortment of perennials, and an ever-growing number of well-crafted fictional characters.  She serves as the Minister of Faith Formation at Grace Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island, WA.  Kim’s writing always limns the world with new light.  A word of warning, her delight is contagious.

–LAJI

Kim’s personal blog is Wazoo Goes West.  Her professional website is KLCockroft.